The Quiet Ones

John Pogue's The Quiet Ones is a "One-Trick Pony" movie.  It repeats the same scenes, and the same loud noises on the soundtrack in order to get a jolt out of its audience, that the whole experience becomes tiresome rather than suspenseful.  You can see potential throughout the film, with its secluded setting, unexplained happenings, and a somewhat creepy backstory behind the paranormal events.  But the filmmakers don't trust these atmospheric elements, and instead bombard us with loud noises and a shaky camera that turns scenes of terror into a blurry mess.

One sure way to note that you are not watching a confidently made horror movie is when it constantly intensifies everyday sounds, so that the popping of a cork, or even two people having sex in the other room sound just as loud and as threatening as the ghostly shrieks and wails that eventually start echoing down the halls.  The film's constant attack on the theater's sound system, combined with the repetitive and turgid pace of the story, all but guarantees that audiences will find little to remember here.  And just like seemingly every other horror movie out these days, it's "inspired by actual events".  I have no doubt that the set up of the story has some truth to it, but by the time it's over, the notion that this really happened is more than a little hard to swallow. 

As the film opens, it's 1974, and an Oxford Professor by the name of Joseph (Jared Harris) wants to perform an experiment on an orphaned girl named Jane (Olivia Cooke).  We learn that Jane has lived with various families over the years, who would adopt her, and then become terrified when strange and paranormal events started to happen around her.  She constantly talks about an evil doll that is actually alive named Evie as the source of her problems.  Joseph hopes to draw out her negative energy, and prove that the supernatural is just something we create ourselves with negative emotions.  He has a handful of students helping him on the project, including his cohorts Krissi (Erin Richards) and Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne), as well as the newest member of the group, Brian (Sam Caflin), who is hired to videotape the experiment.  This means we get to spend large parts of the movie watching the action through Brian's camera lens, making part of the film a "found footage" movie, and the other part a traditional narrative movie.  At times, it's almost as if the movie can't make up its mind.

Joseph's funding for the experiment gets pulled by the college, so he gathers up Jane and his crew, and relocates them to his secluded house in the middle of the woods to continue the experiment.  As Joseph and his young team settle in, we get some halfhearted attempts at character development between them that really goes nowhere.  While veteran actor Jared Harris gets off a couple good scenes with his slightly more colorful role, the younger cast is not given enough to do, or enough personality for us to get attached.  There are moments that hint at deeper personalities for the young students working under Joseph, but they usually end up being underwhelming.  As for Olivia Cooke as the haunted Jane, the movie basically requires her to do nothing but look off into space with a vacant stare for most of her scenes. 

And despite four credited screenwriters, The Quiet Ones seems to lose inspiration fast, as it makes us watch the same kind of scenes and listen to the same dialogue over and over.  It gets to the point that you can almost set your watch to the film.  There will be five to ten minutes of quiet, followed by a loud jolt or a spastic camera shake, signifying that something is supposed to be happening all of a sudden.  If the movie had used this trick only once or twice, it might have been effective, but it's the only move in the film's arsenal.  So, even though the film has been made with some amount of care, we just aren't invested.  The movie is constantly toying with us, thinking that its lulling us into a sense of safety, only to jolt us out.  The thing is, after the second time this happens, we're ready for it, and constantly ahead of the film.

With a different script, one that actually was interested in creating genuine atmosphere instead of jolting us every ten minutes, I could see this idea working.  The fact that the film becomes a slave to second-rate horror cliches ends up sinking any potential it may have had.  Instead of feeling shaken or nervous when its done, we feel kind of frustrated and annoyed.  Maybe the movie should have taken its title a little more literally, and been a bit more subtle.

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